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Country station setting. Bertha, widowed squatter's only daughter has her life disrupted by a strong gentlemanly new manager with whom she falls in love - despite being engaged to a neighbour's son. A season in Sydney and suspicions of the manager's relationship with her beautiful maid and foster sister Rose cannot banish him. The maid's disappearance and her ghostly visitation with her baby on the night she dies reveals that it is Bertha's fiancee who ruined her - so Bertha is free to marry her true stalwart lover ... Begins with a dingo hunt and descriptions of the beauty of the the Australian bush; brief reference to Shakespeare's Desdemona. (PB)